Cooption and Misrecognition in a French Suburban Town: The Difficult Implementation of Anti-Discrimination Programs at Local Level

The French suburban town under scrutiny in this paper is located outside of Lyon and has long been a test case for urban development policies. With a dense network of local organizations, long-time activism against racism, a new minority mayor in 2014, and the highly-broadcasted launching of an antidiscrimination program, it could have been the ideal place for a new form of antidiscrimination policy at local level. However, the analysis of a series of interviews with activists and public actors involved at various levels of public policy implementation (n=18) and of a series of observations conducted in 2016 and 2017 allows us to highlight difficulties in implementing anti-discrimination policies with local non-governmental actors. This paper will highlight an epistemological difficulty: there is no permanent agreement on the understanding of what discriminations are and what the best way to fight them is. The paper will first introduce anti-discrimination policies in France and the reorganization of integration policies according to this new frame. This will set the context to understand the ways in which anti-discrimination programs could appear as a promising tool for a suburban town plagued with urban segregation and socio-economic deprivation. However, disagreements on the definition of discrimination, structural issues related to the implementation of urban policies and “misrecognition” of minority claims emerge from the analysis of the interviews. We will argue that difficulties to collect and acknowledge instances of discrimination based on religious and ethnic membership oppose serious challenges to the implementation of antidiscrimination programs at local level.